This research will determine the extent to which American culture contains attitudes and values which might encourage or justify rape by providing psychological releasors or rationalizations for sexual assault. As an approach to rape prevention, delineating psychological releasors stems from the social control perspective in deviance research, which maintains that people deviate when they can successfully repress their inhibitions against anti-social behavior through justification or rationalization. To prevent rape, then, we must discover and eradicate the sources of justification of rape activity in the cultural context of potential rapists. Toward this ultimate end, the present study will conduct interviews with samples from three populations; 1) convicted rapists, to determine the rationalizations they actually use, plus other attitudinal correlates of rationalization usage; 2) the general public, to determine the extent to which they share the beliefs which rapists use as rationalizations; and 3) social service workers, to determine the extent to which they share these beliefs, and the extent to which, through behavior based on their own attitudes, they deter or foster rape-supportive attitudes in their clients. Independent variables of importance include; 1) respondent's self esteem and own sex role satisfaction; 2) adherence to sex role stereotypes of masculinity and femininity; 3) attitudes about sexual behavior; 4) beliefs that sexual relationships are largely adversarial; 5) attitudes toward interpersonal violence; 6) exposure to media and educational treatments of rape; 7) contacts with victims and assailants, and respondent's own experiences with coerced sex; 8) standard demographic variables. Each cluster of independent variables is expected to affect the two principal dependent variables of the study; 1) degree of adherence to rape-supportive statements; and 2) judgments of specific situations as "real" rapes. Through this research approach, we will derive a theoretical framework which will provide a basis for recommendations for sex offender treatment, for training social workers dealing with victims and offenders, and for effective methods of changing the current cultural milieu to one which condemns rape at both the overt policy level and the covert attitudinal level.